By Randy Demary

For most of its history, the Church has been a driving force in Western medicine. We have always understood that our job is to tend the sick. The Church has flouted societal norms, ancient and modern, of despising the sick. It has reshaped culture to be more empathetic. The Church has built hospitals, entire networks of them! We have formed religious orders dedicated to the care of the seriously ill and dying. However, as medicine and society have changed, especially in the last century or so, this role has faded.

In the last week and a half, the hospice agency I work for has seen a sudden increase in the number of patients we are admitting. California is expecting to be 50,000 hospital beds short of what will be needed in the coming weeks. The healthcare system as a whole is already inundated with people in need of help, and our leaders are scrambling to ease the pressure. Late last week, the military reported it was redeploying hospital ships to key locations to help meet the enormous need. Make no mistake, many who need help will suffer as a result of our limited capacity and resources.

I believe the Church has a role to play in easing this pain—by restoring our attention to the medical arm of our historic mission. How can we mobilize? How can we ease the pressure on hospitals? How can we ease the pain of the people who are struggling with medical care and end-of-life issues?

4 Ways to Get Started in Medical Mission

1. Implore others to follow the safety protocols. Refrain from gatherings. Keep six feet of social distance. Work from home. Wash your hands for 20 seconds. We all know the litany by heart by now, yet many are dismissing these safeguards out of hand. The more people who abide by the protocols, the slower the virus will spread, and the burden on the medical system will be dispersed.

2. Encourage sharing, not hoarding. With the public in a panic and buying up all the disinfectants, hand sanitizer, and face masks (despite repeated insistence that these aren’t needed or valuable for the VAST majority of the population), healthcare workers are without the equipment they need. I happened to have a box of 20 of the coveted N-95 masks for working with power saws. I set a couple aside, given the nature of my work, and am giving the rest to hospital workers who are reduced to making their own masks, thinking it’s better than nothing. Your congregation could hold a mask drive encouraging those who have masks (either through happenstance or panic buys) to donate them to a local hospital. What a tremendous discipleship opportunity.

3. Guide others to make and document medical wishes. If you are ready to go all in with the medical mission of the Church, this is a great way to do so. Making medical preferences known before tragedy strikes is extremely important, especially during the current pandemic.

Imagine, if you will, that a person suddenly becomes critically ill. In an ideal world, they receive the attention of medical staff in a timely manner and are assigned a hospital bed promptly. Next, medical personnel must evaluate the patient and determine appropriate options for treatment. Usually, critical illness means that the patient is in a state where they cannot speak for themselves, and it falls to others to determine what option the patient would choose if they could do so themselves. This is usually an emotionally intense process laden with much guilt and second-guessing. Several hospital staff must try to guide the family through this process over a few agonizing days or even weeks.

Now, imagine while all this is happening, another patient and their loved ones are starting the same journey. They do not get seen right away, because staff are occupied helping the previous patient and their loved ones. They do not get admitted quickly because there are no beds available. They wait, and they suffer as they do.

What if it could be easier? What if the clergy of the first patient had engaged in medical mission by educating their congregation ahead of time on medical decisions and providing moral and logistical guidance? I can tell you from countless experiences, the families of such patients still hurt, but struggle far less. They receive the gift of not being forced to make medically and morally complex choices for a loved one under pressurized conditions. They can simply affirm what their loved one has already chosen and documented. The families are then freed up to be present with and support their loved one. This spares the family and usually the patient much suffering (thanks be to God!).

4. Know the issues. So-called “heroic measures” were primarily invented to treat younger, healthier people—not the elderly, frail, chronically ill patients they are often used on. There aren’t many absolutes with such matters, but for the former population, these interventions are often beneficial and good, while for the latter they’re frequently hurtful and even cruel. We find ourselves in a bizarre world in which applying the most expensive,technologically advanced treatments humanity can provide may be the least loving option.Part of our medical mission may be helping to discern when these things are good and helpful, and when they are burdensome, hurtful or even selfish.

However, I urge you to approach these topics with caution. Many people are living with unresolved grief and others with deeply entrenched patterns of avoidance. Please, be gentle with them. While some people are born to families where they begin processing these things at a young age, others never do so until suddenly blindsided by them. With the former, you will be able to get much farther. With the latter, perhaps you will only be able to normalize the possibility that death need not be a terror to flee from all one’s days. After all, Christ taught us that death can be of value; beauty can come from ashes. When death is not dreaded and feared as the ultimate evil, you will have healthier, more whole people.

Your Toolkit for Medical Mission

  • Pew Trusts reports on how various faith communities have intersected with medical issues.
  • Five Wishes is a recognized and credible tool for recording medical preferences, a type of “advance directive,” in an uncomplicated and nonthreatening manner. It costs $5 per form but is of priceless value. Here is an example.
  • Five Wishes’ tools specifically tailored for faith communities to educate their people.
  • The Conversation Project specializes in free tools to help people speak to others about medical choices.
  • Hard Choices for Loving People by Hank Dunn, a veteran hospital and hospice chaplain, is a useful, short book that helps explain the most important medical choices in everyday language.

Have you found helpful medical mission resources for churches or individuals? Let us know.

 

The Rev. Randy Demary is an experienced chaplain with a history of working in hospice & health care at large. He is skilled in Palliative Care, End-of-Life Care, Bioethics, Bereavement, Public Speaking, and caring for people of any or no faith tradition. Randy has a Master of Divinity (MDiv) focused in Ethics from Fuller Theological Seminary.